Backups & Uploading

A backup is a complete record of a transhuman ego — personality, memories, skills, and everything else that makes you you, short of your physical body. It also includes all of the information about your brain’s neuronal connections. These are needed to either emulate your ego digitally or print it onto the brain of a new morph.

The primary use for a backup lies in not staying dead. Your backup can be resleeved into a new morph or run as an infomorph, perhaps as a fork of your original self. You can also egocast yourself across the Solar System as an alternative to long, slow space voyages.

Aside from quirky scientists who keep brains in vats, almost all backups exist in one of two forms: cortical stack backups and uploaded backups. Because backups are complete, stored transhuman egos, the term ego is used interchangeably. “Backup” implies that the ego will be kept in storage, while “ego” implies that it will be run as an infomorph, resleeved, egocast, or the like.

Cortical Stacks

Arguably the most important piece of technology transhumanity has ever invented, cortical stack implants are predictably taken for granted. Physically, cortical stacks are nanodiamond memory modules about the size of a cigarette butt. They’re tough to destroy, designed to be retrieved from even the most mangled corpse or shot-up synth. In most morphs, they’re implanted near the brain stem, where the neck meets the back of the head. To make them easier to find, synthmorphs with heads have them here, too.

A cortical stack is linked to a neural lace network of nanobots throughout the brain (biomorphs) or to the cyberbrain (pods and synthmorphs). It backs up your ego once every second, or 86,400 times per Earth day. Just based on the amount of data in a transhuman brain, this is non-trivial. Add in the billions of connections between neurons, and it’s even more impressive. Almost everyone in the Solar System has one, with the exception of very young children and flats living in bioconservative polities.

Aside from containing a backup of your ego, your cortical stack backs up everything on your mesh inserts: your muse, lifelog, any software or blueprints you own, and all other data you amass. This takes up a tiny amount of space compared to the ego itself.

Popping a Stack

The process of cutting out a cortical stack is called “popping,” as a skilled extractor can usually get the smooth-shelled implant to pop right out by making an incision in the correct place and applying pressure. Excising a cortical stack in surgery or a workshop with no time constraints is automatically successful. Popping a stack under less ideal conditions (e.g., with a vibroknife in a smoky, bullet-riddled ventilation shaft) requires either a Medicine: Paramedic Test (biomorphs) or a Hardware: Robotics Test (synthmorphs) This is a task action with a timeframe of 4 action turns on a dead, unconscious, or immobilized morph. If this is too long, decapitating the morph and taking the whole head for later excision has a timeframe of only 2 actions turns (1 action turn for big/choppy blades).

Popping a stack from an immobilized, living morph inflicts 3d10+10 DV. The GM may impose a longer timeframe, adjusted damage, and/or penalties on the test if the morph has its stack in a non-standard position or if the stack is heavily protected (e.g., beneath armor plates). The victim, the perpetrator, and all witnesses must make a WIL Check or take SV 1d6.

Morphs with swarm composition have distributed cortical stacks. If a swarmanoid is destroyed, recovering the ego requires gathering at least 1/3 of the swarm’s mass, a tools shop, and a Hardware: Robotics task action with a timeframe of 6 hours, after which the ego can be uploaded normally.

Uploaded Backups

Backing your ego up to a computer is insurance against a lost or destroyed cortical stack. Once your ego is uploaded, it can be archived to secure storage, run as an infomorph, treated with psychosurgery procedures, or egocast to a distant locale.

Uploads can be a transfer or a fork. A transfer eliminates all traces of the original ego in the morph from which the upload originates. This is standard procedure when resleeving, egocasting, or evacuating a body. Forking creates a copy of the ego while leaving the original ego intact. Forking is legally restricted in many polities, but it is a common practice to upload beta forks, egocast them to distant locales for important errands, and merge them with their alpha when they return.

Upload Speeds

Upload Type	Time
Transfer of ego from biological brain	1 hour*
Fork of ego from biological brain's neural lace	1 action turn
Transfer/fork from cyberbrain	1 action turn
Fork from extracted cortical stack	1 action turn

* Potentially longer if farcasting, given distance lag.

Uploading and Ego Bridges

How uploading happens depends on the media and the intent. If the ego is being transferred from a biological brain, the process requires a toaster-oven-sized device called an ego bridge. In use, the ego bridge’s sensor array twists open like a morning glory blossom, revealing an enclosure with a neck rest. The neck rest deploys millions of nanobots into the brain and central nervous system. The petals are full of sensors that image the brain, relying in part on data from the nanobots as they spider cells and connections. During resleeving, the nanobots act as tiny wet printers in the destination morph, connecting nerve cells and adjusting chemical levels to replicate the neural network data in the original. The ego remains awake during the procedure, allowing for a slow and smooth transition of consciousness from the old morph to new. When the transfer is complete, the nanobots sever connections in the original morph’s neural network, effectively “zeroing” the brain for the next occupant.

If the ego is being forked from a biological brain, the ego is simply copied from the cortical stack’s neural lace network. Likewise, an ego transferred or forked from a cyberbrain or infomorph is simply uploaded. Recovered cortical stacks work the same way. These copied egos can either be saved as inactive backups or instantiated and run as infomorphs.

Under normal circumstances, no test is required to upload an ego.

Post-Mortem Uploads

If the cortical stack is missing or destroyed, you can still upload an ego from a corpse or destroyed synthmorph. The deceased morph must not have died from damage that destroyed the brain tissue or cyberbrain (GM’s discretion).

If a biomorph, the person must have died within the last 2 hours, otherwise cell death makes the ego irretrievable. For every 15 minutes after death, an ego recovered from a biomorph loses 5 points from a single skill (player’s choice). Putting a dead biomorph in a healing vat halts skill loss but doesn’t reverse losses from before then.

Death and Backup Insurance

What happens when you die depends largely on if people know you died, where you died, and what sort of insurance or contingency options you have in place. Almost everyone has some form of insurance plan, but they vary greatly in quality and level of services offered.

When a death is reported, most local authorities will make an effort to inform the person’s backup provider and return the stack (if possible). Given the varied and scattered polities of transhumanity, however, this does not always work. Moreover, details on the backup service may be unknown — many people list it in their social network profiles, but not everyone. Criminals don’t want their backups subpoenaed, and covert operatives don’t want them targeted by enemy hackers. If your stack is recovered, however, you will usually be temporarily re-instanced and asked (and perhaps questioned about your demise).

If you died somewhere remote or lawless, no one may bother following standard protocol. Your stack might be sold to ego traders, it might be dropped in a drawer. If your backup service resides in a rival polity, your ego may be saved into cold storage with others and used as a political football. Some polities — notably the Titanians and anarchists — have a policy of automatically re-instancing people as infomorphs no matter what their situation.

Basic Backup Insurance

All characters are assumed to have some type of backup insurance. This could be a contract with a reputable body bank, an arrangement with a black market chop shop, a relationship with an anarchist morph-design collective, Titanian citizenship, or the payoff for working with a covert organization like Firewall.

All backup services provide the following:

• An attempt to retrieve your stack/ego through appropriate channels.
• In the case of verifiable death, re-instancing you as infomorph from your stack (if recovered) or from an archived backup (if not) to discuss options.
• Doing the same in the event you have been missing for a pre-determined period (usually 6 months, but variable). Most people set their muses to periodically check in.
• Resleeving you in a morph of equivalent MP, depending on availability. In the case of repeat deaths over a short time period, this MP value will be lowered for each subsequent death (Acquiring Morphs).

For people with resources, additional services may be offered, including hazardous stack retrieval options or hardened storage (Services).

Uninsured Characters

If you have the No Backup Insurance trait, you do not have a contingency plan in place. You should try to die in Titanian or anarchist territory, as they are the most likely to bring you back. In hypercorp space, uninsured characters may be offered an indenture contract or kept in dead storage until someone claims them. Elsewhere, your stack may simply be destroyed or sold on the black market. Without a plan, death may be the end of your character.